Changes in
Acer’s distribution
Acer India has re-aligned its distribution to adapt
to the changing dynamics of the market over the
past six months.
In December it re-aligned its consumer
desktop distribution by assigning exclusivity for
the south zone to Redington; the rest of India will
be handled by Ingram Micro.
“The consumer desktop market works very
differently compared to the consumer notebook
market,” explained S Rajendran, CMO, Acer India.
“The growth is driven by system builders who
have customers who are looking for a branded
desktop. We wanted distributors who could work
closely with assembler channels. We also felt
that the MOP would be protected if a single
distributor handled the zone.”
Acer has also signed on Cyberstar to
exclusively stock and
sell servers. “We have
seen 100 percent
growth in the server
business, but it’s still
largely back-to-back.
Partners have been
asking for ready
stocks for servers,
and Cyberstar is
known for building
S Rajendran
exclusive channels.
This new arrangement should push our server
market share to double digits by next year,”
Rajendran added.
Meanwhile, Neoteric has been signed on
to exclusively sell Acer-branded AMD platform
notebooks and netbooks. Said Rajendran, “There’s
a lot of promise which the new AMD Brazos
platform offers. However, AMD-based products
are still largely push products, and we felt the
need for a distributor who could focus exclusively
on the AMD platform. Neoteric has successfully
built a channel for our Options business, hence we
are confident they will do a great job with this new
arrangement.”
There will be no immediate changes for other
product lines. Mainstream notebooks will continue
to be sold through Ingram Micro, Supertron,
Redington and Salora. Ingram Micro, Supertron
and Salora will continue with the distribution of
monitors while Supertron will exclusively manage
eMachines. n
— Ramdas S
4

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

Canon wants laser leadership
n ABHIJEET MUKHERJEE

C

anon India has set itself a
target of `1,700 crore in 2011,
out of which `678 crore has
been set for its printer peripheral
division, Consumer System
Products (CSP). It also plans to
regain its No 1 position in the
laser printer segment during
the year.
In 2010 Canon India recorded a
growth of 49 percent with revenue
of `1,257 crore while its CSP
division grew by 66 percent and
recorded a turnover of `469 crore.
In laser printers Canon
recorded 98 percent growth in
2010. “We garnered revenue
of `300 crore in this category,”
informed VP Sajeevan, Director,
Consumer System Products
Division, Canon India. “Our goal
this year is to become the No 1
in the laser printer category and
achieve 42 percent market share.”
To achieve this, the company
has dropped many distributors
and signed new ones. Explained
Sajeevan, “The new distributors
were chosen through an exercise
where we mapped partners on
three qualities—financial health,
organizational skills and business
infrastructure. The ones who have
been removed failed to meet the
above criteria.”
Under the new distribution
policy, Canon will now have
only one regional distributor per
product category. “This is being
done to ensure stable pricing and
partner profitability. We have
formulated a policy whereby
anyone selling Canon should
make profit margins which are at
least 2 percent more than what he
would get by selling a competing
product,” Sajeevan said.
Canon has also introduced
a new partner program
called Channel Relationship
Enhancement and Activation
Management (CREAM). The
program has been devised for its
secondary and tertiary partners.
The company plans to conduct

“Anyone selling
Canon should
make profits
which are at
least 2 percent
more than what
he would get
by selling
competing products”
VP Sajeevan

Director, Consumer System Products
Division, Canon India

52 activation programs this year.
“Through CREAM we intend
to meet partners and discuss
healthy business practices that
will guarantee their growth and
profitability,” said Sajeevan.
Streamlining its post-sales
service is another focus area. “We
have 350 post-sales locations; we
intend to increase this to 500 in
the first phase by June and touch
the 900-mark by December,”
Sajeevan disclosed.
On the product front, Canon
expects to launch new products
at the entry-level. The company
is also trying to improve the
availability of its most popular
entry level model, LBP 2900,
which has been in short supply.
In addition, Canon plans to
strengthen its mid and high-end
laser printer portfolio, and has
created a separate team to ensure
this. On the office inkjet front, it
plans to aggressively push Pixma.
In the home and SOHO space,
the company plans to leverage
new technology products such
as DVD printers which print
moving pictures frame by
frame. Canon will also increase
its 1,000 original ink centers
to 2000 in 2011. In addition,
this year the company plans to
open 100 exclusive showrooms
called Canon Image Square; it
already has such stores in cities
such as Mysore, Mumbai, Delhi,
Ahmedabad and Jaipur. n

Add.qxp

2/28/2011

3:09 PM

Page 1

contents

April 01, 2011 l Volume 4 Issue 23

Cover Story

Deliver

18

NEWS
Analyses

Channel Chief

Canon wants laser leadership

4

Changes in Acer’s distribution

4

8

Infortrend eyes storage market

8

Blue Coat strengthens
distribution 13

Opinion

12

Feedback

12

Shadow Ram

34

Get Personal

34

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

Q&A with John Chambers
Why he believes Cisco is a more
compelling bet for partners than
HP or IBM, and what role the
network, collaboration, video will
play in the businesses of the future

16
Role Model
Rajeev Krishnaswamy and Anand
Karapurkar, Founder Directors,
Infobahn Technical Solutions, have
built their expertise on IT integration services around SCADA and
security surveillance domains

Over the past
two years,
Girish Krishnamurthy,
Managing Director,
Kaseya India, has sold
the promise of
automated managed
services to the partner
community. His
biggest test starts
now as he sets out to
deliver on that promise

Tech Focus
Acrobat X Pro for Mac
Delivers a solid and elegant
application that fits in nicely
with advances made on OS X

28

starting line
MUST

Read

Infortrend eyes
storage market
Infortrend, the world’s eighth-largest external disk
storage vendor by shipments, is planning to fortify
its India business. It is scouting for a national
distributor for its DAS, NAS and SAN products.
“India is an important market for Infortrend,
and we are planning significant investments here
to grow exponentially,” said Wilson Sung, Senior
Director, Pan-Asia, Infortrend. “The revenue target
for our India business in 2011 is $4.5 million.”
The company’s storage portfolio consists
of three main product families: ESVA for fiber
channel or iSCSI SAN applications for mid-range
to large enterprises; EonStor DS consisting of
entry-level storage solutions delivering competitive price-performance; and EonNAS which serves
file and block-based applications with a unified
storage platform.
Sung explained
the key highlights of
the product families.
“ESVA features storage virtualization, distributed load-balancing, thin provisioning,
array-based snapshot
and replication, and
SAN tiering. EonStor
DS fulfils differWilson Sung
ent host requests,
fiber, SAS and iSCSI. For the drive site, we have
products for 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch SAS, SATA and
fiber hard disks; most of our products can scale
up to 100 drives.” EonNAS, based on a unified
storage platform, consolidates storage and allows
for flexible performance and capacity scaling with
features that simplify storage management.
“Infortrend’s USP is that it offers good
performance at reasonable prices,” remarked
Sung. “Resellers have advantages working with us
because we provide the same features as the big
brands but at lower prices.” The company already
has a support partner for India, Msys, which manages post-sales aspects such as spares dispatch
and onsite diagnostics.
Infortrend initially plans to enroll enterprise
VARs in tier-1 cities, and with time expand to
smaller cities. Sung also informed that a local
subsidiary operation is being contemplated. n
— Dhaval Valia

8

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

Lenovo to scale up retail
business on Chinese model
n RAMDAS S

L

enovo will continue to model
its consumer business in India
on the success the company has
found in China, and is planning to
have 1,000 dedicated retail outlets
here by March 2012.
In the past quarter the
company has doubled its number
of retail outlets from 200 to 400,
and over the next year it will
have around 850 LESlite stores—
smaller footprint retail outlets,
either stand-alones or shops-inshops—and around 150 Lenovo
Exclusive Stores.
“In China, we have close
to 6,000 Lenovo stores, and
a market share of almost 30
percent. We are a late entrant in
the Indian market compared to
our MNC peers, and we feel the
best way to grow will be to learn
from the China success story,”
said Alex Li, Director, Consumer
& SMB, Lenovo India.
Li admitted that setting
up stores is the easier part of
building a successful retail
chain. “We need to ensure that
every store is profitable, and that
partners are able to sustain the
business month after month. Each
LESlite store, depending on its
size and location, needs to sell
between 20 and 60 PCs a month
to break even.”
Lenovo is now putting in
place a strong marketing and
lead-generation plan to ensure
faster break-even for its retail
partners. “Whether it be storefront promotions or ensuring the
right SKUs for display, we will
see that every possible step is
taken to ensure that retailers are
profitable,” said Li. “We have
revamped our schemes so that
even the smallest LESlite can
break even. We have penetrated
many regions, especially in the
north and east, where we have
managed to garner significant
mind share.”

“In China we
have 6,000
stores and a
share of 30
percent. The
best way to
grow here is to
learn from the
China success story”
Alex Li

Director, Consumer & SMB,
Lenovo India

Lenovo has also consolidated
its regional distribution network.
“We want our RDs to be
profitable too,” added Li. “Most
LESlite stores buy from RDs,
and this has ensured healthy
numbers for them.”
Li said that Lenovo will launch
a fresh multi-media campaign
targeting youth and the back-toschool market in Q22011. “I admit
we have been fairly conservative
with promotions compared
to other brands, but you can
definitely expect a bigger splash in
the next few months.”
Added Rajesh Thadani,
Director, Consumer Business Unit,
Lenovo India, “We had planned
our stocks for the past six months,
hence our inventory levels in
retail are lower compared to the
competition. This has helped us
do quick product refreshes with
newer technologies and features.”
He said that the company has been
doing well in the AIO PC market,
and has captured more than 50
percent share.
According to IDC India,
Lenovo clocked nearly 1,07,000
units in the consumer desktop
and notebook category, with 9.7
percent market share in Q42010.
The company recently hired a
new marketing head, Shailendra
Katyal, who was with Marico
Industries. n

Add.qxp

2/28/2011

3:15 PM

Page 1

edit opinion
Volume 4, Issue 23

Can he deliver?
dhaval valia

O

ver the past two years, if there’s
one person who has captured
the attention of the enterprise VAR
community in the country it has to be
Girish Krishnamurthy, the Managing
Director of Kaseya India.
Krishnamurthy has singlehandedly popularized the concept of
remote infrastructure management
services or automated managed
services (AMS) among the partner
community. He has convinced and compelled several leading
tier-2 partners to rethink their break-fix infrastructure services
delivery model and invest in what he believes is the future of IT
infrastructure management—AMS.
More than 90 partners have made substantial investments in
building their AMS portfolio based on Krishnamurthy’s promises. Along the way, Kaseya has emerged as the largest AMS
platform provider in the country.
Many partners who have worked closely with Krishnamurthy
know that increasing awareness and adoption of AMS is not
just a business for Krishnamurthy—it’s a mission. However, having done all the groundwork to enable and ready the AMS ecosystem, Krishnamurthy’s real test starts now—that of delivering
on the promises he has made to the channel.
While many of the partners continue to believe in Krishnamurthy’s vision, a considerable few are also getting a bit jittery
due to the lack of momentum of their AMS business. Over the
past few months some of his disenchanted partners have gone
as far as to describe him as a flawed dream-merchant, someone who has promised a lot but delivered little.
This is not to say that Kaseya hasn’t done good business. In
2010 it sold 5,50,000 end-point licenses, and while this number
is impressive it is much lower than what Krishnamurthy himself
had anticipated.
The man is candid in admitting that there have been more
misses than hits, and that several of his strategies haven’t delivered on the ground. “I would put our success ratio at just about
20 percent of what we had planned to achieve,” he says.
The other challenge for Krishnamurthy is to justify internally
the $6 million he has invested in the company’s Indian operations since he took over the reins in 2008. After all, this is a
significant amount, and Kaseya’s global management would
expect Krishnamurthy to make good the investment.
Despite all the skepticism Krishnamurthy isn’t deterred. He
is still convinced about the long-term potential of AMS. He says
he is not giving up so easily, and that in 2011 he plans to grow
the business three-fold.
He is also aware of the great responsibility he carries: the
90-odd partners who have placed their trust in his vision.
This, he says, is his biggest motivator. “Nothing is going to
stop us from dreaming and trying.” n
E-mail CRN Executive Editor Dhaval Valia at dhaval.valia@ubm.com
10

f you listen to all the marketing
hype today, you would think the
cloud is readily available and any
customer problem can be solved
with a cloud solution. The cloud is
still being formed and, while more
problems can be solved today than
yesterday, it is still years from being
dominant.
The change is real; and solution
providers will have to make some fundamental changes
to their business in order to adapt to the changing market
models.
First, you must build a strong sales team capable of
selling benefits to line-of-business managers. The days of
selling strictly to the IT department have been waning for
years. That trend will accelerate as management realizes
that cloud solution purchases are a business—and not a
technology—decision. Selling to non-IT management is a
critical and different skill you must master.
Second, you need to realize that marketing must
become a core competency and no longer be an
afterthought. When you are selling solutions where there
is very little in the way of physical equipment delivered and
installed at the customer site, it’s the positioning of your
service capability that matters. Brands always matter, but
the question is, whose brand will be most critical in the
cloud? My argument is that your brand needs to stand for
something other than access to technology. If you can’t
answer the question of what you’re better at than your
competition, you have a problem.
The third challenge is that it’s your job to drive
demand, not the manufacturers’. This is not to say that
manufacturers shouldn’t lend a hand by providing guidance
and tools, but in the end the value you bring to your
supplier is revenue generation.
The fourth trend you need to deal with is figuring
out how to cut through all the hype and select the right
suppliers for the future regardless of who you have had in
the past. You also need to be cautious about working only
with what appears to be the hot company of the day. It will
take some examination of programs and the company’s
DNA.
The fifth consideration is a truthful examination of your
resources and customer set. It’s going to be important to
know what you do well. Regardless of all the talk around
the cloud, there is still a lot of money to be made selling
infrastructure, and many customers will continue to want to
own and manage it. n
Email Robert Faletra at robert.faletra@ec.ubm.com
12

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

Slowdown
in the market

Compliance at HP

While every magazine is
focused on highlighting
opportunity, what many
have missed is the demand
slowdown in the IT
market for the past 3-4
months. The demand
for IT products among
consumers and small
businesses has actually
come to a standstill, and
a channel mag like CRN
should analyze the reasons
for such a slowdown.
At a time when the
country is growing at
more than 8 percent GDP,
the lack of IT demand is
a concern. Is it because
consumers are preferring
to buy from large format
stores or is it because
of consumer sentiment
turning negative due to the
tremendous rise in the cost
of living?
CRN ought to take up
this issue and analyze
it in order to provide a
clear picture in terms of
what is happening in the
marketplace.
Shyam Pal Singh
Partner, Divya Infotech, Jaipur

The move by HP to make
the user verification
process stringent is a
good move. The issue
of bid leakage is a big
issue among commercial
partners.
However, HP will have
to ensure that the process
needs to be practical
and should not cause
suspicion in the minds
of the customer. Also, HP
will need to see to it that
the additional scrutiny
of the user verification
process doesn’t lead to
delays in clearing special
prices and partners losing
deals.
Pritpal Singh
Skynet Computer Solutions,
New Delhi
We welcome this initiative
and urge other vendors
to follow. Some large
partners are known to
take the market for a ride
with bid leak. We hope
this action will curtail this
practice.
Toshy Mathew
AKITDA President, Ernakulam

“In 2010 the
Indian WAN
optimization
market was
estimated at
$26 million,
and forecast to
hit $100 million
by 2016”

W

AN optimization specialist Blue
Coat has augmented its distribution strategy in order to focus on the
SMB market. In addition to its existing distributors Westcon and Virtual
Netcomm, the company has signed
Computerlinks to exclusively focus on
its SMB range which largely consists
of products from its two-year-old
Packeteer acquisition.
“The Indian market has high
growth potential for WAN optimization. In 2010 the revenue for WAN optimization was estimated at $26 million and forecast to hit $100 million
by 2016,” said Kumar Mitra, Country
Manager, India, Blue Coat Systems.
About Computerlinks Mitra said,
“We have had a successful association with them in the Middle East and
Europe. They bring to the table strong
experience in managing our service
provider partners in India. Together

Kumar Mitra

Country Manager, Blue Coat Systems

we are now looking at developing a
dedicated channel ecosystem for the
SMB segment.”
Mitra said that Computerlinks will
distribute its ProxyOne range of Web
security appliances and also its cloud
service solutions in the SMB segment.
“A focus for 2011 is launching our
cloud-based WebPulse services. Globally, we have comprehensive cloud

services for Web security, and we are
finalizing the India strategy to launch
these services,” he informed.
The company is also planning to
introduce its partner program consisting of three-levels: Elite, Premier
and Authorized. “Each level provides
individualized programs and benefits
to support and reward committed
partners,” said Mitra.
Blue Coat currently has 60 active
partners in India, and the plan is to
triple the figure.
“Our plan includes expanding in
the north and south, with branches in
Delhi and Bengaluru. We are increasing our marketing and sales resources.
We already have a good technical
team in India, and we will strengthen
it. Our focus will be on driving marketing and demand for Blue Coat by
doing events together with our partners,” said John Andrews, Director,
Marketing, MEA & APAC,
Computerlinks. n

TalariaX looking for VARs
n Ramdas S

The company’s range of products
is marketed under the SendQuick
brand, and offers six variants suitable
for different usages including SMS
marketing, SMS for business processes, IT alert SMS, 2FA (two-factor
authentication) SMS OTP, and SMS
by using Outlook and Lotus.
“Being OS-independent, SendQuick can integrate with all products and applications across all OS
platforms and messaging protocols

such as SMTP, SNMP, HTTP Post
and ODBC,” informed Shyan. “Our
pricing, which includes the appliance, modem and a one year warranty,
is between S$4,000 and S$12,000.
We license per server, hence it is an
unlimited users and usage license.
The product can scale based on the increase in the number of GSM modem
connections for higher throughput.”
The company is scouting for VARs
with a strong focus on network security and IT infrastructure. “We are a
channel-driven company. SendQuick
is a product that’s complementary to
many products such as firewall, network monitoring, SSL-VPN and 2FA.
In this way, the VAR is able to sell a
suite of products to his customers,”
added Shyan.
TalariaX has two partner programs—the Value Added Distributor
program and the Certified Partner
program for VARs.
The company aims to sell around
150 units of its appliances in the
country in 2011. n

Computer Reseller News

“We are seeing
strong adoption
of SMS in
mid-to-large
companies in
functions such
as IT alerts,
business
processes, and marketing”

S

ingapore-based TalariaX is firming
up its channel strategy to target the
Indian market for its SMS gateway solutions. As a first step, it has appointed Ashtech Infotech and Cubix Micro
Systems as sales partners who will
sell to both end-users and partners.
Said Wong Jeat Shyan, CEO,
TalariaX, “SMS has become the most
popular communication medium
among the younger generation, hence
more companies are using SMS in
their business activities. We are
seeing strong adoption of SMS in
mid-to-large companies, especially in
functions such as IT alerts, business
processes, and marketing. India offers
us a great opportunity because it is
the world’s fastest-growing mobile
usage market. By 2013, India is set to
overtake China to become the world’s
largest mobile telecom market. Today,
there are over 600 million mobile connections in India, and it would reach
over 1.1 billion in the next two years.”

Wong Jeat Shyan
CEO, TalariaX

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

13

channel chief
“Channel business is still evolving at Dell”
Ramdas S spoke to Mahesh Bhalla, Executive Director & GM, Consumer &
SMB, Dell, about the company’s new business unit—Global Commercial Channels
Dell has been engaging with
channels in the country for
more than three years, so what’s
the need for launching Global
Commercial Channels (GCC)?
The channel business is still evolving
at Dell, and we are constantly
trying to improve our business
model. We have a number of
business units addressing different
customer types such as SMBs, large
enterprises, and the public sector.
Previously, a partner needed to
speak with different groups inside
Dell depending on the customer the
partner was addressing.
Most commercial channel partners
address customers across SMBs,
enterprises and the government, and they wanted a
single point of contact irrespective of what kind of
customer they were addressing.
From now on, irrespective of what their business
model is or what kind of customers they address, we will
have a local account manager to address all requirements.
Our PartnerDirect program will be led by the GCC
team which will serve as a single point of contact for
channel partners across the company’s different business
segments.

Many partners say they are uncomfortable that Dell
expects its partners to do a deal registration before
they actually quote to the customer. Why does Dell
insist on deal registration every time?
Dell has named accounts, which are customers we service
directly. The rest is termed the white space, and is open to
both Dell and its partners.
We share the named accounts list with our partners on
request, while in the white space we have a transparent
system to ensure that there’s no conflict between our
direct sales team and our partners. Hence, if a partner
registers a deal with a white space customer, and the deal
is approved, Dell will work closely with the partner on
that opportunity.
Our policy is to work with the partner whose deal
registration is approved; we do not entertain any other
partner, or even the Dell direct sales team, for that
account.

“Our PartnerDirect program will be led by
the GCC team which will serve as a single
point of contact for channel partners
across different business segments”
14

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

Dell does not have a price list for
commercial channel partners to go
to market with, and this is an area
of concern for many of them.
Dell is largely a built-to-order
company. Our pricing changes
dynamically, and depends on several
factors including the customer, the
type of solution the customer requires,
and the quantity. We do provide
partners with pricing and discounting
within a couple of days after a deal
registration has been approved.
We understand that partners need
a ready-to-reckon price list, so we
will soon announce an online price
configurator which will be available to
our partners.

A considerable amount of your enterprise and SMB
business is still direct. How much of your business
will henceforth be direct and how much will be
through channels? Do you have a named account
and rules of engagement policy?
We have not planned any specific mix for the channel and
direct business; depending on the business unit it could
be different.
The number of named accounts is not very high,
maybe a couple of thousand in India. I would also like
to tell you that in some cases where the customer feels
that a partner brings extra value, Dell routes the business
through the partner even in a named account. These are
not just a few accounts; there are several instances where
we have worked through partners in named accounts.
We have robust rules of engagement, and if any
member of the Dell direct sales team tries to address an
opportunity registered by a partner, we take action against
the Dell employee. If partners encounter such situations,
they are advised to talk to their account managers and
escalate the issue if need be.

How many partners are you planning to address
through GCC?
We haven’t set any specific target. We recognize the
channel as an important growth engine to gain greater
coverage and customer access in a market like India,
especially in the highly-distributed medium business
segment. Today we have roughly 2,000 registered partners,
and engage closely with 200-300 of them.

Are you planning to appoint distributors for partners
addressed by GCC?
As far as possible, we would like the deals done
through GCC to be direct between Dell and the partner.

channel chief
Under certain circumstances, mostly for financing and
logistic reasons, we transact through one of our national
distributors to support partners.
For example, since there was a demand for entry-level
tower servers through a stock-and-sell model, we have
recently appointed Supertron Electronics as a national
distributor for entry-level servers.
We have distributors primarily for the consumer
channels across all major states, master sales affiliates
(MSAs) and also distributors for consumer desktops.

Is it true that Dell will not allow GCC partners to sell
the Inspiron and Studio XPS brands?
Studio XPS and Inspiron are essentially brands
addressing the home and SOHO markets. We expect
GCC partners to address customers who are SMB and
above, and we position the Vostro and Latitude brands
for this segment. We also have our PowerEdge servers
for this market, plus a whole range of other enterprise
solutions.
However, in extraordinary cases, where the demand
from the customer is for an SKU or specification which
we do not carry in Latitude or Vostro, and the quantities
are large, we can always support the partner by offering an
Inspiron or XPS model.

Consumer channels still complain that their
transfer prices from Dell-appointed MSAs are much

“We understand that partners need a
ready-to-reckon price list, so we will soon
announce an online price configurator which
will be available to our partners”
higher than Dell prices for the same SKU off the
Dell Website.
That’s not really true, and I am surprised that despite all
the communication we have done that this impression
persists among channel partners.
Let me explain. First of all, Dell does not sell the
same SKU through both channels and its Website.
Second, in most instances, the model sold through the
channels would have a carry bag (often costing around
`1,500), while the model on the Website would not come
with a carry bag. Third, we generally ship a 15-month
McAfee license along with most models sold through
channels, while this is not available for same-spec online
deals. Fourth, there’s a delivery charge of `900 if you
are booking online. Fifth, the online customer needs to
pay upfront and wait for 10-15 days, while through the
channel partner, he can receive delivery immediately.
However, in very rare cases, the channels could have
some older stock whose prices—including all the extra
freebies available through the partner—could be higher
than what we have on our Website. n

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

15

special focus

Q&
A

John Chambers
Ch ai r ma n & C E O , C i s co

Cisco Systems’ Chairman and CEO
John Chambers recently sat down
with CRN at Cisco’s headquarters
in San Jose, US. The wide-ranging
conversation touched on the growth
of the Cisco channel, why he believes
Cisco is a more compelling bet for
partners than HP or IBM, and what
role the network, collaboration, video
and other Cisco hallmarks will play in
the businesses of the future. Here are
excerpts from the conversation.
What is the message from Cisco for this year?
At the 10,000-foot level, what’s most exciting is that
many of the market transitions we anticipated are
happening. The network is becoming the platform for
all forms of communication and IT; it’s also going to
enable a different generation of productivity around
collaboration, it’s going to change the data center, it’s
going to change health care, it’s going to be at the center
of everything from security to video.
Recently, at the World Economic Forum, with top
economists from Europe, the US and China, we talked
about GDP growth for the next 3-5 years and beyond.
All of them agreed that we were in for a decade of
productivity growth that would probably be 2-3 percent
or more. When I asked them what’s going to cause that,
they said, ‘What you’re doing, John.’ They said this
in front of hundreds of my customers, so I could have

16

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

hugged them right there.
Collaboration will drive the next generation of
productivity and organizational structure, and is an
area I expect to grow very rapidly over the next 5-10
years.
The second thing is that there hasn’t been a new
hardware player in the data center for decades, and
contrary to all the prognostications we are breaking
away there. We have very much established ourselves.
We are among the top three x86 players, we’re
winning a lot in the cloud, which is the second
generation of virtualization data centers. The product
is winning most of the performance awards, and it isn’t
servers separate from the network separate from storage,
it’s that combined, first in a physical data center, then
in the cloud, then all the way in your home.
The third area you think about in terms of the
approach is video. Video is the next voice. It’s going
to be how we communicate. Nine years ago we built
a router that did a billion phone calls. We are now
building a router that does a billion videos. I think
you’ll see the same exponential curve on that, except
that video will have much more cost justification
whether it’s entertainment or productivity, whether it’s
how you enable a collaboration, how you enable virtual
organizations together, whether it’s just permitting you
to travel halfway around the world.
Probably 75 percent of my time now with customers
is virtual, as opposed to visible, and it usually isn’t oneto-one anymore, it’s usually many-to-many. If you look
at what we have done with telepresence, our Tandberg
acquisition, coming down to show-and-share to the
desktop to what we are doing with Videoscape, you
will realize where we are headed—it’s any device, any
content, all video.
So between the focus on collaboration, the focus on
video, the focus on data center virtualization, the focus
on clouds, you have a breadth and depth of array that
none of our peers have.
Isn’t Cisco spreading itself too thin? We often hear about your
30 adjacencies. Partners are overwhelmed by the level of
opportunity from smart grid to video and health care and the
rest. How do you want them to prioritize?
Let me separate our top bets into categories. Small to
medium business, IP NGN (Next Generation Network),
Borderless Networks, data center virtualization, video,
cloud and smart grid.
Those are the major moves we’re going to make.
Then we’ll do a portfolio play and tie them all together.
Based on the business case, partners will have to

“There hasn’t been a new hardware player
in the data center for decades, and
contrary to all the prognostications,
we are breaking away there. We have very
much established ourselves”

special focus
decide where and how they want to move, but what has
to change is you don’t want to take on a competitor on a
single, stand-alone product.
If partners continue selling a single, stand-alone
product, you’re ignoring perhaps the strongest thing
Cisco does, which is an architectural approach, which
protects their investments, allows them to move into
new markets relatively seamlessly, and while they
might not move into video or cloud today, or security
architecture today, what we have built is the vehicle
that allows them to do it from an architectural play.
When I talk with the leaders of large customers
around the globe, I don’t talk routers and switches. I
talk, ‘How does your physical world come together
with your virtual world? How does your supply chain
change? What are your competitors doing that you need
to do differently? How does the customer buy today
versus how they used to buy? How can we help change
that in a store, physically and virtually?’
There’s no choice but to change. I think we’ve hit the
market transitions right.
With Leo Apotheker now running the show at HP, we’ve heard
a lot of emphasis from HP on becoming a software company
and upping its stake as a software company. Does Cisco need
to be seen as a software company?
These are three separate questions. First, Leo is a good
person and a good friend, and I wish he weren’t at HP.
Same thing with Ray Lane, their chairman. And I will
feel very guilty beating them.
But it’s hard to change the culture and direction
of a company. We spend 13 percent of our revenue on
R&D. We acquire a huge number of companies every
year. In the last year alone we spent over $6 billion
on acquisitions. That’s hard to do. Our success rate
on acquisitions has been amazingly good. And while
90 percent of this industry’s acquisitions will fail, 70
percent of ours meet or exceed expectations. We will
have some misses of course, and if we don’t, we’re not
taking enough risk in terms of the direction.
We in many ways caught the market transition
on data center virtualization, and our large peers,
by surprise. Much like we did when Nortel, Lucent,
Alcatel, Siemens and Ericsson said ‘Cisco, you really
don’t understand this market.’ We didn’t do bad. We
became the No 1 player, probably five times the market
cap.
The data center in this market has similar
characteristics. Make no mistake about it, they see
us coming—this time we’re not going to sneak up on
anybody—but this really is the breadth and depth we
offer that no one else does.
Are the supply chain issues over?
I want to apologize for the lead times last year and
lack of communication with partners. We clearly hurt
them and hurt ourselves and hurt our customers and
it look us too long to fix. But if you look now, all the
lead times, with very few exceptions, are within the
expected range. While there’ll occasionally be bumps

“Leo is a good person and a good friend,
and I wish he weren’t at HP. Same thing
with Ray Lane, their chairman. And I will
feel very guilty beating them”
during the year or surprises from a supplier, I think
you’ll watch us handle it differently. We didn’t just
handle the scenario well last year, we had a systemic
issue.
So what’s there 3-5 years down the line?
Three to five years down the line is going to have a
lot to do with organizational transformations and the
effectiveness that goes with it. That will drive a decade
of productivity.
You will also see, if we’re right, the organizational
structures change. The network IT will be so deeply
embedded in the business process that you won’t talk
about business process and IT enabling it.
They will be one and the same. That in people’s
minds might have been a stretch 3-5 years ago, but
when I talk to the top 5 percent of CEOs in the world
they not only get it, but when you sit and listen to them
you can’t tell what’s IT and what is their business. It’s
starting to occur.
Any acquisitions planned for this year?
You will see constant, if we do our job right, gamechanging acquisitions. We don’t do them just to acquire.
We do them when the market is right, when the price is
right, and we try to catch market inflection points. So
we try not to look in our rear-view mirror, and we never
set our strategy based on what our competition is doing.
If you’re setting your strategy off your competition, by
definition, you are 2-3 years behind.
Any holes in the portfolio?
In the architectural play there are going to be constant
holes that you have to fill. Security is our No 1
emphasis across the whole company, mainly because
it’s our customers’ No 1 issue. There is no such thing
as a secure data center or network. That is huge for the
future and huge for the industry, and probably has to be
solved in the network.
So that’s an area where we have to do dramatically
better, you can’t unless you’re in the data center, unless
you’re in enterprise, unless you’re in service provider,
unless you’re in wireless, unless you go all the way to
consumer, to any device, to any content. I don’t know
how to resolve this issue without this.
On the positive side, it’s great it’s the focus. On
the negative side, you’ve got to say, ‘What took you so
long? If you’re the only architectural play, which you
probably will be, why don’t you move faster?’ And
that’s probably fair criticism.
Security in and of itself can cause a huge upgrade
cycle. It’s an architectural play if we’re right on that. n

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

17

cover story

T

here’s a rush of activity in and around the office
of Girish Krishnamurthy, the MD and CEO of
Kaseya India. It’s the month of March, and like
in any other business there’s number pressure
on the Kaseya team.
But Krishnamurthy is busy planning ahead. He is
trying to finalize a deal with a drama troupe in Chennai
which will, over the next few months, present a skit at
customer-facing events organized by Kaseya’s partners
to convey how automated managed services (AMS) will
help customers make the best of their IT infrastructure.
The man is frequently interrupted by different members
of his team to remind him about a number of pending
items on his agenda—the targets in March, the visit of a
prominent Delhi-based channel partner, an appointment
with the CTO of a telco giant, and price clearances for
some volume deals.
Amid all these activities Krishnamurthy is also multitasking on a presentation for his internal team on the
future of AMS, and the strategies they need to adopt to
ensure that the momentum is maintained. “We have just
about seen the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “The potential
that lies untapped is huge. Customers who have seen the
advantages of AMS and Smart SLA are asking for more.
They require more intelligent and more proactive services
that are based on historical data and that would aid faster
decision-making.”
Kaseya is closing a 12-month period where its
strategies have changed many times. During this period
it has completely altered its pricing model, inked deals

with around 50 partners, taking its total MSP (managed
services providers) to 93 across the country, and helped
TCS to roll out its ambitious iON program—an end-to-end
IT-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering targeted at SMBs.
The AMS vendor managed to sell close to 5,50,000
licenses during 2010, and is expected to add another
2,50,000 licenses in the first quarter of 2011. Krishnamurthy estimates that the licenses sold should have created a
services market for the partners worth around `66 crore,
with margins of anything upward of 30 percent.
He has bigger plans for the rest of 2011: he intends to
sell 1.5 million licenses during the year. He estimates that
this would create for the partner network a market for
services in excess of `200 crore.
There are partners who are excited by this opportunity.
Take for example Mumbai-based Orient Technologies.
Orient has set up a 700 sq ft 10-seater NOC which is
presently working in multiple shifts and managing
around 5,000 end points. “We are confident of the number
reaching 10,000 by April this year, and anything between
20,000 and 30,000 end points by [the end of] 2011,” says
Ujjwal Mhatre, Director, Orient.
Adds Nanda Kumar, Vice President, Sales, Kaseya, “It’s
difficult for us to estimate the exact partner investments
in NOCs or in the RIMs business. But it’s safe to say that
most partners have built a business model where their
overall margins are in excess of 30 percent.”

Moving spirit
If there’s one executive who has captured the attention of

Deliver
Over the past two years, Girish Krishnamurthy,
Managing Director, Kaseya India, has sold
the promise of automated managed
services to the partner community.
His biggest test starts now as he sets
out to deliver on that promise

RAMDAS S

18

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

cover story
the top honchos of mid-market enterprise channels over
the past two years it has to be Girish Krishnamurthy.
He was literally a non-entity for Indian IT channels
till three years back. No one knew him, and he knew very
few in the channels in the country. This despite a career
spanning multiple continents, consulting with KPMG,
and then heading the business of enterprise CRM vendor
Talisma.
His rise has been mercurial. From being the top
executive of a software vendor trying to capture market
and mind share in India in 2008, Krishnamurthy is now
regarded as the catalyst who helped several partners to
transform their business by 2011.
“If you see it purely from the technology point of view,
what Kaseya has brought in is nothing new,” notes KV
Jagannath, MD, Choice Solutions. “It has existed before
with other vendors such as IBM with Tivoli or HP with
OpenView. However, unlike with these vendors, who
have been largely focused on the enterprise market, with
Kaseya an SMB customer can be serviced by a partner.
This is true partner enablement, and the effort which the
Kaseya team has put in is remarkable.”
Adds Ganesh Mahabala, Senior Vice President of
Bengaluru-based Value Point Systems, “Krishnamurthy
has been instrumental in at least seeding the thought of
becoming a service provider (SP) in the minds of many
channel partners. It does not matter how many of them
actually become successful in the business; I am seeing
a number of peers going beyond box-selling and entering
the world of services, and Kaseya is laying out a platform
with the lowest entry-level costs.”
Yet the ride so far has been anything but smooth for
Kaseya and Krishnamurthy, and the vendor’s progress has
been riddled by many mistakes. Indeed, Krishnamurthy
is the first person to admit that he has made mistakes.
“There have been more misses than hits. In fact, I would
put our success ratio at just about 20 percent of what we
had planned to achieve. But that’s not going to stop us
from dreaming and trying.”

In the beginning
Kaseya India set up its sales operations in early 2008.
“In the early days we followed the same model as an
IBM or a CA, and chased the enterprise IT infrastructure
management space. But no one was willing to listen to
us. We spoke with large national systems integrators
(SIs), and again there were few buying into us,” recalls
Krishnamurthy.
He realized that the top-down approach was not working, and that what Kaseya really required was a bottom-up
approach. “We knew that there were a few thousand partners in the country who sold and supported computers.
They addressed customers ranging from home users to big
public sector organizations. We wanted to come up with
an offering that would change their business.”
The pricing model was therefore changed. While
globally Kaseya sells perpetual licenses for a one-time fee,
in India, where they were already being sold at discounted
rates, a new pricing model was evolved that would further
amortize the licensing costs over a period of 3 to 5 years.

“I would put our success ratio at
about 20 percent of what we had
planned to achieve. But that’s not
going to stop us from dreaming
and trying”
Girish Krishnamurthy
MD, Kaseya India

Things then started looking attractive because the new
costs amounted to as low as `20 per end point per month
for servicing.
Another major learning was that the Indian market is
different from Western markets. Notes Krishnamurthy:
“The cost of an IT technician in India is far lower,
between `8,000 and `20,000, hence the traditional
licensing model was not going to work in India. This
forced us to think beyond product sales, and to build a
platform-based approach.”
Also, in the latter part of 2008, Kaseya changed its
original plan and started to target mid-market SIs and
solutions providers. “The new plan looked great on
paper,” says Krishnamurthy. “I was sure that everyone
would buy into it and that we would start making
millions. We rolled out an aggressive marketing program
to go after these partners.”
Over the next few months Kaseya conducted 11 events,
connected with 450 channel partners across major cities,
and tried its best to sell licenses. The result? Only one
partner signed up. “While everyone at the events showed
enthusiasm, we had just one conversion. Biren Selarka
of Acma Computers was the first to see the value, and
actually set up an NOC. He became our poster boy for the
next year,” Krishnamurthy recalls.
Despite this extremely poor conversion rate, and the
lack of conviction among the mid-market reseller and SI
community, Krishnamurthy says he never lost hope. “We
knew the partner community was genuinely interested.
We identified around 125 top mid-market SPs and went
after them, not missing a single opportunity to make our
presence felt on any platform targeted at them.”
According to Krishnamurthy, the turning point was
an event Kaseya organized for around 25 partners in Sri
Lanka. “We flew in the partners along with their families and organized a workshop. We didn’t discuss our
product line; we merely explained the potential that
the platform offered. We pointed out that over the next
five years there was a potential of $28 billion of MSP
business that could be outsourced to India, and that
the existing channel partners had an equal chance to
grab this opportunity even if they had to compete with
an Infy or TCS.” Soon, partners such as Choice Solutions in Hyderabad and Frontier Solutions of Bengaluru
started investing in the platform.
In May 2009 Kaseya decided to brand its offering
as ‘Automated Managed Services,’ and announced
the AMS platform. “But it was more than a branding
exercise,” Krishnamurthy insists. “We felt that partners
needed a better story to take to their customers. Since

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

19

cover story
“It’s difficult to estimate the
exact partner investments in NOCs
or RIMs. But it’s safe to say that
most partners have overall
margins in excess of 30 percent”

“Girish has been instrumental in
seeding the thought of becoming
an SP in the minds of many
partners. It doesn’t matter how
many of them succeed”

Nanda Kumar

Ganesh Mahabala

VP, Sales, Kaseya

Senior VP, Value Point Systems

the economics of the break-and-fix model was threatened
by the spiraling costs of manpower and travel, it became
easier for us to sell.”
Thus started a signing spree, and by July 2010 the
vendor had signed on around 93 of the top 125 SIs in
the country. In between, Kaseya launched Smart SLA,
which is a service on top of the Kaseya platform, and
helps partners to use a rule-based expert system to
design and deliver SLAs across a number of domains.
“The idea was to move up the value chain and offer
services which would add real value for the customer and
provide proactive and pre-emptive services,” explains
Krishnamurthy.

Plenty of critics
Yet for every admirer of the software vendor there’s a
detractor. Over the past few months Krishnamurthy has
been described as a flawed dream-merchant, someone
who has promised a lot but delivered little.
A classic case of disenchantment was Kaseya’s

Operation 1111. The objective was to usher in the first
day of the first month of 2011 with 1,111 organizations
adopting the AMS platform. While the company’s partner
network did actually sign up 1,080 customers, the services
revenue target of $50 million and end-point target of
5,00,000 were not met. “It’s true that we set a very high
target in terms of end points. We believed we could sign
up customers who on the average would sign up with 500
end points, but our final average was only about 186. We
missed out on those numbers,” admits Krishnamurthy.
Still, he says that over 2,050 pilots were implemented,
and that nearly 600 of those who have not yet signed up
are likely to come on board.
Then there’s the change in the pricing model, which
upset some of Kaseya’s early adopters who had signed
for volume pricing on perpetual licenses. “But we have
resolved the issue with these partners by providing them
lifetime perpetual licenses for the amounts they have
paid so far, and moving them to the subscription model,”
informs Krishnamurthy. “Going forward, the new pricing

PARTNER VIEW: Choice Solutions

Early adopter

H

yderabad-based Choice Solutions was one
of the first partners to sign on with Kaseya.
Unlike most of the other partners, Choice
took on AMS as a greenfield project. “Though
we were using Kaseya to support an education
customer of a partner company in the US, with
the exception of power we never focused on
infrastructure management in India. Hence, for
us, it was a completely new business focus,”
explains KV Jagannath, MD, Choice Solutions.
Jagannath asserts that the move to managed
services was one of the best the company has
KV Jagannath
made in the past few years. “We were already an
established player in the power market, and had
a strong customer base. We were targeting a services business
with better yield, and managed services made sense.”
Choosing Kaseya as a partner was easy. “We already had
expertise on the Kaseya platform. Moreover, we saw that the
company had a business model which suited us since we

were initially targeting SMBs, for whom costs
mattered.”
Jagannath feels that while the business
model and channel friendliness is widely
appreciated, it’s important to note that the
platform is also very robust. “We need to
appreciate the fact that they have a very good
product, and that it’s easy to build a service
delivery model around it.”
Choice plans to acquire about 250
customers for its AMS services in India this
year. “Today, managed services account for
around 6 percent of our top-line and nearly
20 percent of our bottom-line. We see these
numbers growing.”
Jagannath said that to succeed in the business partners
need to spend a lot of time understanding the services model,
and also need to have a strong understanding of their customer
base. n

We need to appreciate the fact that they have a very good product, and that
it’s easy to build a service delivery model around it

20

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

cover story
model will be the preferred way.”
There’s another issue. A number of partners feel they
have lost out in the race as the attention has completely
moved to larger partners. Complains Rajeev Mehta, the
MD of Zest Systems, Delhi, “I am not at all happy with the
way Kaseya has handled the sales effort. We have invested
and had a promising start. But then they seemed to have
changed strategies, and we are very disappointed.”
Krishnamurthy defends his position. “In December
we took a call to work closely with a set of 25 partners at
a time because with a larger set of partners our attention
was getting divided and there was a lack of focus. This list
will be dynamic, and will change from month to month,
and we will sign on more partners in future.”
Some of the partners also feel that they are not able to
build a differentiated service model because most of the
mid-market resellers with an interest in the platform have
moved to Kaseya. To this grouse Krishnamurthy replies,
“We are a support system to the partner, a platform to
build a service delivery engine. The most important cog
in the wheel is the customer, and how well the partner
understands the customer. A partner will be easily able
to build a differentiated approach if he understands
the customer because no two customers are the same,
and every customer poses individual challenges. What

“I am not at all happy with the
way Kaseya has handled the sales
effort. We had a promising start,
but then they changed strategies,
and we are very disappointed”
Rajeev Mehta

MD, Zest Systems

we have seen among partners who have been really
successful is that they understand what each customer
wants, what the customer pain-points are, and hence they
are able to provide a differentiated solution.”
Others feel that Kaseya needs to do more to make end
users aware. “While I am very happy with Kaseya, they
need to make AMS and the Kaseya brand more popular
among end users so that we see pull for the brand and
services surrounding it,” says Selarka, Acma’s CEO.

Counting numbers
During Q12011 Kaseya launched an aggressive marketing
program along with select partners, depending on the
commitment or target set. For example, for a partner
targeting the signing of 50,000 (and above) end points by

PARTNER VIEW: PcVisor

A service with over 600 features

P

cVisor promotes an enterprise framework
which offers comprehensive managed
services for managing network infrastructure
and end points. Promoted by Tarun Seth of
Microclinic and former Apple India MD, Alok
Sharma, PcVisor has built its platform on the
Kaseya engine.
“Our framework is an automated managed
service with over 600 features to manage IT
infrastructure including PCs, servers, storage,
network, power conditioning, printing, security
and infrastructure applications. The services can
TARUN SETH
be tailored to meet the needs of consumers and
enterprises alike,” explains Sharma, now the MD
& CEO of PcVisor. “We chose Kaseya because it fitted perfectly
with our plans, technically as well as commercially.”
Sharma says that over the past 18 months the company
has spent over 100 man-months to develop the framework.
“The AMS market is still in its infancy. We have the first-mover
advantage as a branded SP, with a proven solution cutting
across several verticals. The beauty of the solution is that we do
not require any special servers or re-configuration in the user’s
existing infrastructure. This results in automatic and recurring

computer audits, keeping the inventory up-todate and accurate at all times, and allowing it to
be accessed from any location.”
Seth says that PcVisor will work both
independently and with other channel partners.
Some of the clients of PcVisor are Carrier
Aircon, Living Media and Naukri. “We are
targeting around 1,00,000 end points with our
service over the next 12 months,” Sharma
informs.
For the home market, PcVisor is launching
a service called UnbugMe. This includes
antivirus software from McAfee, and features
such as system and security updates. The
service will retail at `1,499.
Adds Sharma, “Over 90 percent of the calls are related to
performance management and software. These issues can be
effectively tackled proactively using PcVisor functionality. Our
mission at PcVisor is to make life simple for IT administrators
and SIs, and to reduce their cost of delivering the services while
increasing their productivity. We are expecting customers to
use our different services including asset management, storage,
patch updates and security.” n

The beauty of the solution is that we do not require any special servers or
re-configuration in the user’s existing infrastructure

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

21

cover story
Customer view: HR Johnson

Cheaper than backup

H

R Johnson is one of India’s leading manufacturers of
flooring tiles and is headquartered in Mumbai.
In 2010 the company realized the need for a real-time
incremental backup solution for all desktop and laptop users
in the organization. The idea was to see that freshly created
files by users were automatically backed to a central server.
“The first suggestion was to invest in a network storage
box, and opt for one of the enterprise backup solutions.
However, Frontier Business Systems, our IT vendor,
suggested we look at Kaseya’s AMS platform and use the
same for backup,” recalls Sutanu Ganguly, Head IT, HR
Johnson.
“A traditional enterprise backup solution would have
cost the client a bomb, and we wanted to offer something
that would save costs. Since the customer needed real-time
backup of new files created, we wanted a proactive solution
that was automated and also monitored,” explains Anirvanjyoti
Chaudhuri, who heads the AMS practice at Frontier. “Kaseya
fitted in perfectly because it’s proactive, automated, and can
be monitored.”
Another criterion, according to the Frontier team, was the
cost. Their own estimates was that a solution on top of Kaseya
was one-third the cost of an enterprise backup solution. More
importantly, there was no need for a separate network storage
box, and files could be backed up to a central repository
server.
“The Kaseya team was very helpful and provided us with
a POC, which went off well. Then we went for a pilot for a few
users, and over the next few months added more users. We
believe we have saved some money, and are happy with the
solution,” says Ganguly.
Adds Ravi Verdes, CEO of Frontier, “At Frontier we are
using Kaseya beyond the traditional break-and-fix, and are
exploring ideas to solve problems that are out-of-the box.” n

The Kaseya team was very helpful
and provided us with a POC,
which went off well. Then we went for
a pilot for a few users

September 30, 2011, Kaseya would manage a marketing
budget of `30 lakh where the vendor contribution would
be around `19 lakh with the rest managed by the partner.
The marketing would include events, microsites, EDM
campaigns, and print and Web advertisements. For every
large partner who is working on a committed target in
excess of 10,000 end points, a dedicated manager helps
the partner team in all aspects of the business. There
are also numerous training packages thrown in to help
partners to upgrade their skill sets.
“Over the past three years we have invested over $6
million in our operations, and a very high percent of that

22

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

has been spent in educating the market. This is the year
of consolidation for us, and we are expecting a bumper
year,” says Krishnamurthy.
According to Nanda Kumar, the number of end
points clocked averages between 5,000 and 15,000 every
week. “We expect the numbers to scale up as more pilot
programs are being launched.”
Krishnamurthy says that the thrust this year is to
ensure that everyone in the ecosystem is profitable. “We
are not actively looking to sign more partners. Rather, we
want to ensure that our existing partners are profitable.”
The focus will also be on offering more features on the
platform and making these available at an extra cost in
the subscription offer. “According to our studies, when
a partner bills `100 for a service, he is sharing between
`15 and 25 with us for the AMS platform license fee; the
rest are margins to support the customer,” Krishnamurthy
informs. “As partners scale up and offer more value-added
services, our share of the earnings goes down and the
partner makes more money.”
While there are rumors about Kaseya being acquired,
Krishnamurthy says that plans for the liquidation of stake
have been put off for at least another 18 months. “I am not
denying that there were offers in the past. We are growing
very quickly in several markets, especially in Europe and
Latin America, and the potential is huge, hence partners
must not worry about us being acquired.”
He says that in the next 12 months the company’s
focus will be to acquire customers from the BFSI, ITeS and
education segments. “We are already in touch with the
top 25-50 customers in these segments, and partners have
been identified.”
Kaseya has also formed a team for setting up AMS
forums for verticals such as BFSI and ITeS. Krishnamurthy
expects the BFSI segment to account for some of the larger
deals during the next two quarters.
A lot of his focus has been on building collaterals and
guides for partners to implement the AMS business. An
example is the Kaseya Blue Book, a ready reckoner for any
partner who wants to venture into the world of AMS. In
addition, the Kaseya team has created a communication
set which includes covering letters for proposals as well
as templates for different market segments. The company
is also working on weekly targets. These targets are not
about the number of licenses sold to channels but about
partners signing-up end points with customers.
An estimated three million end points have been
added over the last year in the enterprise and SMB market, and the potential is huge. There are also considerable
opportunities in the home market. “To deliver the support
the home user needs, we will align with telcos, with delivery done through a cluster of Kaseya partners,” informs
Krishnamurthy. “But this will take time.”
The biggest change which Krishnamurthy is seeing
is within Kaseya itself. “We today account for around
8-10 percent of Kaseya’s global business. This month
we have a number of teams from across APAC coming
over to India to understand our business model and goto-market strategy. I see other Kaseya teams following
our model soon.” n

Virtual
Channel Show
CRN gives you a chance to be a part of

India’s first Virtual Show
for the Channel Community

“CRN Virtual Channel Show” will
be a live, online exposition well
complimented by a conference program
that delivers a wealth of knowledge,
education and insight right to your PC.

Visit

http://www.crn.in/vcs

to be a part of this live show from 17–18th May 2011

For Exhibit & Sponsorships, Contact
Salil Warior +91 99875 80188

For General Queries :
Sejal Acharya +91 9819475566

market focus
Are we facing
another slowdown?
Many resellers selling to both home and SMBs have seen their sales volumes
dipping by as much as 15 percent compared to the same period in 2009
n Abhijeet mukherjee

T

here is an increasing
concern among channels
about slowing IT demand
as sales over the past 4-5 months
have failed to meet expectations.
Many resellers selling to both
home and SMBs have seen their
sales volumes dipping by as
much as 15 percent compared to
the same period in 2009, while
compared to sales volumes in
OND 2010 there has been a dip
of more than 25-30 percent.
“On the retail side the demand began slowing following
the end of the Diwali season.
November was lukewarm, and
while December showed some
spurt it was nowhere close to
what we had expected. The January to March quarter has failed to buoy demand either from the home
or commercial segment,” says Kishore Makhija, CEO,
Priyanka Computer Services, a Raipur-based sub-distributor. “In all, our sales volumes have dipped by 25
percent since October.”
Agrees Purushotham Beller, CEO of Shimoga-based
Typewell Computers, a multi-brand reseller, “Our sales
have dropped by 30 percent in the last 4-6 months.
Compared to the same period during 2009, when there
was a global slowdown, our sales have dropped by 15
percent. While pre-Diwali we sold an average of 50 PCs
monthly, we now manage only 30-35 units. Not just the
home segment, demand from the SOHO, SMB, enterprise and government sectors is also showing a downward trend. Resellers all over Karnataka are facing the
same problem.”
Even some vendors agree to this rather unexpected
trend. “The retail IT market has been quite flat when
compared to the previous year. We observed growth till
the last quarter when most of our sales were derived

“The last few months have seen negative
sentiments from many sides such as increase
in the cost of living and developments in
Japan and the Middle East”
24

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

from the festive season offers. In the JFM quarter we
have seen a considerably dip in the IT retail sector. The
slowdown has been more pronounced,” admits S Rajendran, CMO, Acer India.
While there is no clear explanation for the slowdown, Rajendran believes that a combination of
many factors could have dented consumer sentiments and IT demand. “Taking the JFM quarter as an example, the impact could have
been felt because of increased inflation and the rising cost of living.
Other factors such as examinations and the cricket world
cup could also be possible
reasons for a slowdown
in PC sales. The cricket
season has considerably
influenced the footfall of consumers to
retail shops. It seems
IT hasn’t been near the
top-of-mind recall for most of the customers due to the
above reasons.”
Canon too has seen lower than expected sales during the said period. Opines VP Sajeevan, Director,
Consumer Systems Products, Canon India, “The last
few months have seen negative sentiments from many
sides—increase in commodity and real estate prices,
hike in home loan interest rates, fluctuating stock markets, high inflation rates and recent developments in
Japan and the Middle East. All these factors could have
converged to create a certain sense of caution among
end-users, both home and corporate.”
On the retail side, many resellers believe that they
along with vendors will have to work on schemes and
promotions to lure customers to buy PCs and peripherals. “Considering the drop in footfalls and volumes,
we have been urging all our retail vendors to launch
schemes that will attract customers back to stores; these
include affordable bundles, more in-store promotions,
and strengthening consumer financing. More vendors
need to work with retailers to help them offer consumer
financing options in order to make products seem more
affordable to customers,” says Beller.
All things considered, the channel is hoping that
with the new financial year around the corner, things
will improve for the better and business will
normalize. n

Role model

Building

A Niche
Rajeev Krishnaswamy and Anand
Karapurkar, Founder Directors,
Infobahn Technical Solutions, have
built their expertise on IT integration
services around SCADA and security
surveillance domains, and this has
helped them carve a strong niche
for themselves
n SONAL DESAI

I

n a little more than a decade after its inception,
Mumbai-based Infobahn Technical Solutions has today
emerged as a leading enterprise VAR specializing in
systems integration of large projects.
With a turnover of around `45 crore, the company
boasts of a clientele which includes HP, TCS, Indal,
Raymond, Novell and Samsonite.
Infobahn has been expanding its solutions and
services portfolio which today includes skills around
SaaS, security surveillance, SCADA deployment, highperformance computing and data center integration.

The beginning
Infobahn started off as a PC assembler and reseller in
1998. It was founded by the duo of Rajeev Krishnaswamy
and Anand Karapurkar who met while working with HCL.
Recalls Krishnaswamy, “After my engineering I
joined Godrej EPE (today’s Ingram Micro) where I spent
a good two years learning the ropes of selling networking
products to corporates. I met Anand in my second job
at HCL where both of us were in corporate sales. That’s
when we thought of starting our own venture..”
In 1998, with a seed capital of `50,000, the two started
Infobahn as a partnership firm to assemble their own PCs
and resell MNC brands to small businesses.
They rented office space in Andheri, Mumbai,
and purchased a second-hand 386 computer that they
have still preserved. “During the day we used to go to
customers reselling MNC brands, while at night we used
to assemble PCs. We mainly aligned with Compaq and
IBM because they were the most aggressive and well-

“Just reselling products would only make us
as good as the price we offered,
hence we decided to focus on a vertical
which required high skills”

Anand Karapurkar and Rajeev Krishnaswamy

known MNC brands,” informs Krishnaswamy.
Neither of the two had any business experience,
and hence the first two years were a roller-coaster ride
living from hand to mouth. “Since my wife was working
I had the background support to take the risk,” says
Krishnaswamy.
Their hard work finally began bearing fruit, and they
built a strong customer base which gave them repeat
business as well. “We always thought ahead of others,
and started selling laptops in those days when even PCs
were barely purchased,” recall the duo. Vendors noted
the ability of Infobahn to upsell the new product category
and develop new customers, and began wooing them.
Infobahn also tasted success in the education segment
when a number of management institutes such as ITM and
Welingkar signed up with them for laptops for students.
In 2001 Infobahn decided to take a vendor-exclusivity
approach because they felt that aligning with one vendor
would give them faster growth and help them to scale up
the solutions value-chain faster. They decided to align
with Compaq which was subsequently acquired by HP.
Till date the company continues to be an exclusive HP
partner. HP contributes nearly 60 percent of its business
even today.

Evolution
In 2003 Infobahn decided to specialize in high
performance computing and focused its energy on
building skill sets in servers, workstations and engineering
applications, and providing the IT infrastructure for
SCADA deployments. “After reselling products for a few
years, we needed to build a strong differentiation in the
market around solutions. Just reselling products would
only make us as good as the price we offered, hence we
decided to focus on a vertical which required high skills
and had significant opportunities,” explains Karapurkar.
The big break was around the corner. Infobahn was
approached by Partha Reddy, head of TCS’ business in

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

25

role model

2010

2009

2008

2003

2001

2000

SMB business unit headed by Sagar
the US. “TCS was undertaking a
MILESTONES
Singh who has been with us for the
large offshoring project for autolast five years,” says Krishnaswamy.
major Daimler Chrysler, and wanted
“This team is expected to touch
installation and support for 200
Formed Infobahn Technical
HP workstations. Partha, whom we
Solutions as a reseller of MNC 12 new customers every day, and
focus on consultative selling. To
knew from HCL days, called me
branded PCs
ensure that we are always in touch
in the middle of the night to check
with these customers and create
if we could execute the project,”
Became an exclusive partner
a recall in their minds, we have
Krishnaswamy recalls vividly.
of HP
implemented a full-fledged CRM
The order for the 200
application.”
workstations at $8,000 each came
Bagged the first big project
In the past two years the
at an opportune time and changed
for 200 workstations from
company has entered emerging
the entire outlook of the market
Daimler-Chrysler
areas such as cloud computing,
toward Infobahn as well as the
open source, software
company’s own outlook toward
Bagged one of the largest
infrastructure and security and
its business and how far it could
SCADA integration projects
surveillance solutions. It has signed
scale up. “Apart from the size of
up with Tata Communications to
the project, two of the world’s best
from Indian Oil
resell their infrastructure-as-acompanies were reposing their faith
Executed a security
service offerings, while with Novell
in a small emerging company like
it has been developing skills for
us at a time when there were much
surveillance project for the
open source opportunities.
bigger resellers around. This gave us
Taj Group of Hotels
In security and surveillance,
immense confidence in ourselves.
Infobahn
has partnered with large
We were also received with new
Moved into cloud computing
traditional
surveillance solutions
respect in the market. In addition,
services and formed a
providers to offer the IT part of
it gave us entry into other Tata
dedicated SMB division
security surveillance. Subsequently,
companies,” says Karapurkar.
it bagged two very large multi-crore
From an annual revenue of
projects—one for the Taj Group of Hotels post the 26/11
`1 crore in FY2002-03, the company grew to `40 crore
terrorist attacks, and one for a high-security government
in FY2008-09. By this time Infobahn had expanded its
agency which alone is estimated to bring in `4.5 crore.
branch footprint to the south and also become an HP
The specialization in SCADA-led projects has also
authorized service partner.
seen the company bag some big projects over the past few
years. Here too the company’s partnerships with systems
Time to consolidate
integrators specializing in process control have helped it
During the global slowdown of 2009, Infobahn saw
bag multi-crore IT deployment deals.
negative growth and its turnover dipped to `35 crore.
One of the projects undertaken by the company was
However, the company bounced back in the latest fiscal
for automating and integrating SCADA systems at Indian
posting a healthy 30 percent growth to clock `45 crore.
Oil. Also, of late, with environmental regulations getting
Infobahn saw a silver lining even in the slowdown
stringent, power generation and state pollution control
because it gave the company time to review, rethink and
companies are integrating and automating their SCADA
regroup, and plan for the future. “It was also time to
systems to work with IT for compliance.
consolidate the business after five years of high growth.
To showcase its strengthening solutions focus,
We have spent the past two years in building a stronger
Infobahn has set up a business solutions center in Mumbai
organization, and putting in place processes and systems
to demonstrate the various solutions it can provide.
that will help future scaling. We also brainstormed on the
A high-end service around business continuity and
future course of the company, and built a business plan
disaster recovery is another area of interest for Infobahn as
for the next five years,” says Karapurkar.
it sets out on its future course of growth.
The company strengthened its organizational
Says Krishnaswamy, “Our partnership with Tata Comstructure, creating different business units and assigning
munications addresses our strategy to offer a complete
loyal and performing employees to drive these new
solutions and services portfolio where the hardware is
units. “For instance, though we have been focusing on
ours, the data center solutions and application services
the SMB segment, we realized that we needed a separate
come from Tata, and the power solutions come from APC.
team with a completely different market approach to
We have plans to sell our own branded services and the
drive that business. As a result, we created a six member
process has already begun.”
With a reinvigorated strategy and plans to stick to its
“We are expecting a 20 percent CAGR
exclusivity policy, Infobahn is prepared for the future.
“We are expecting a 20 percent CAGR growth which
growth which would help us scale the
would help us touch the `75 crore mark in the next
`75 crore mark in the next couple of years”
couple of years,” says Karapurkar. n

loud computing-based collaboration suites range
from those that are free and limited to those that
are expensive and robust.
HyperOffice provides a low-cost collaboration suite,
built in the cloud, that offers strong functionality, nice
reliability and a strong example of the possibilities of
team based productivity from anywhere.
The CRN Test Center examined the HyperOffice
Collaboration Suite at the invitation of company
executives–examining the solution through a free,
online trial. It was great to see a full-function solution
available to try, for free, immediately without the
aggravating and time-demanding step of first waiting for
a direct sales rep to telephone and make a hard
sales pitch.
HyperOffice provides many basic productivity
and communication tools: email, calendaring, task
creation and tracking, and contact management. While
these functions work well, they are far from out of the
ordinary. But HyperOffice doesn’t stop there. It delivers
value in how it turns personal productivity into team
productivity.
HyperOffice provides ultra-easy sharing and
collaboration functions for each aspect of its suite,
turning its browser-based console into a collaboration
command center. Here are some examples of what
we liked:
n The suite provides an administrator with an
intuitive, easy-to-use console for adding or deleting
members, and managing their access to content
and data;
n Tools, including wiki and intranet page creation and
management are dead-on simple but effective;
n HyperOffice did the heavy lifting with intranetpage creation tools for each member in a group. For
example, it allows for objects to be dragged and
dropped onto individual member page for quick
construction of an internal site for sharing with
the team;

The one area where we found HyperOffice
came up short was an absence of apps
for iOS or Android mobile platforms. Here,
competitors like Lotus and Zoho have apps

Task creation, assignment and notification is a snap,
and intuitive;
n Calendar shares are set up so that different team
members may be given access to different levels of
information. For example, a calendar item on a sales
meeting may be shared with others on the sales team,
but hidden from non-sales colleagues.
Cloud-based collaboration is a crowded field.
HyperOffice must compete with Microsoft’s SharePoint
(both on-premise and hosted), LotusLive, Google Apps
and the free-and-pay service Zoho.
To measure HyperOffice’s effectiveness in
comparison to the competition, we need to examine the
cost and complexity it creates compared to the others–
since cost and complexity tend to be among the biggest
enemies of small or mid-sized businesses.
HyperOffice pricing begins at a five-user plan at
$44.95 per month–meaning the $8.99 monthly user cost
is competitive. As user numbers scale up, pricing per
user scales down; for 250 users, the user monthly cost
is $6.25–even more competitive.
In terms of complexity, there isn’t any. Because it is
a hosted service, no back-end infrastructure is required.
Set-up takes minutes. Enabling user accounts takes
minutes. Getting a work group or team up and running
and collaborating, in a pinch, is about an hour’s work.
The one area where we found HyperOffice came up
short was an absence of apps for iOS or Android mobile
platforms. Here, competitors like Lotus and Zoho have
apps. That’s not a deal breaker but, with the hyper
growth of mobile device use, it needs to be noted. n
n

he bar has been raised over the past several years
in software aimed at PDF creation, editing and
management with companies like Nuance taking
aim at Adobe and staking a claim to this segment.
But Adobe has continued to aggressively move
forward and, with Acrobat X Pro for Mac, it has
delivered a solid and elegant application that fits in
nicely with advances made on Mac OS X.
In evaluating Acrobat X Pro for Mac, we were
interested in three issues in particular:
n Did the software have a footprint that made
installation on a Mac with a small amount of onboard storage feasible and easy?
n Were there advances over previous versions of
Acrobat Pro that make this a compelling application?
n Does pricing make this software attractive or
prohibitive?
Acrobat Pro X for Mac requires 1.2 GB of hard drive
space, which is about one third the requirement for
Windows systems. This is reasonable, and even with
64 GB of hard drive space on some newer MacBook
Air machines is not a deal-breaker in and of itself. It’s
not a fat piece of software, and Acrobat X Pro installed
within a few minutes.
But just because it’s easy to install and takes up no
more than a reasonable amount of drive space, that
doesn’t mean it’s worth it.
Looking at some of the new features, we wanted to
know how much more efficiency Acrobat X Pro brings
to the table and how much more potential to improve
key enterprise needs including document management,
collaboration and efficiency. In particular, we liked
the new Action Wizard that is a key feature in this
application. Not only is it possible to short-cut through
the application to key features including Publish
Sensitive Documents and Archive Paper Documents, it
allows one to create their own action short cuts.
Simply put, the ability to customize action short
cuts, including creating or removing watermarks,
cropping, editing and using text-recognition (OCR) each
have the ability to cut minutes off of even the simplest
of tasks. Creating a wizard action to add a watermark
to a document takes one to two minutes, but can save
a couple of minutes each time this action is taken.

Adobe has integrated a new feature called
SendNow which allows for two-button
e-mailing of documents, or online document
sharing, right from the application’s console
28

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

We found this to be a great way to build efficiency in
document creation and customization.
Acrobat X Pro for Mac also provides a neat
feature: One-button screen capturing into PDFs. For
collaboration of application development or content
creation, this is a very effective and welcome feature.
Another area of efficiency involves Acrobat X
Pro’s way of touching the cloud. Specifically, Adobe
has integrated a new feature, called SendNow, into
Acrobat X Pro—which allows for two-button e-mailing
of documents, or online document sharing, right from
the application’s console. This is a neat integration of
an online service with content creation and another
efficiency added to the Acrobat Pro series.
This leads us to our third question: Is it cost
effective or prohibitive?
Adobe has priced Acrobat X Pro at $449, or $199 as
an upgrade. In this new software era where a plentiful
array of apps are free or cheap, this may be viewed
by many as expensive. But where content creation,
collaboration, document management or document
flexibility are required, Acrobat Pro X cuts through
legacy inefficiencies and brings value to the table.
We’ve liked this software on Windows for a number of
years but the new version, on Mac OS X, just works well.
The CRN Test Center highly recommends Adobe
Acrobat X Pro for Mac. n

channel buzz

Cerebra launches mobile shredder
Cerebra Integrated Technologies recently launched a
mobile shredder in Bengaluru that can handle 3,600
tons of e-waste. The mobile shredder can be taken to
the premise of those companies wishing to process
the e-waste in front of them to ensure copyright
and data protection. The shredder, imported from
Cimelia, Singapore, separates metals and non-metals,
and processes PCBs before raw material extraction.
Cerebra also announced the setting up of an
e-waste facility near Bengaluru over a 10-acre area
that will handle 90,000 metric tons of e-waste per
annum. The facility is expected to be operational by
September 2011 and will be capable of managing the
entire e-waste management cycle.
According to a UN report, the amount of
e-waste being produced could rise by as much as
500 percent over the next decade in countries like
India. Bengaluru alone generates about 70,000 tons
of e-waste annually, and accounts for about 30,000
obsolete computers. n

Assemble your own gaming PC
To popularize the assembling of gaming PCs among
students, motherboard vendor Gigabyte, along
with memory module maker Kingston and gaming
accessory maker Razer, organized a weekly Assemble
Your Own Gaming Machine campaign at two
engineering colleges each in Chennai, Hyderabad,
Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi.
During the half-day program at each college,
students were given a video demonstration of gaming
PC assembly followed by an instructor-managed
gaming machine assembly contest and finally a visit
to the gaming components and accessories display
put up by the sponsors. The instructor-managed
gaming machine assembly contest not only tested
the ability of the contestants to select the correct PC
components but also their speed in assembling them
perfectly.
Winning student teams received attractive prizes
from the sponsors. n

Rashi conducts ATi-HP workstation meet
Acer eMachines channel meet
Acer completed a new channel engagement
program focusing on its eMachines brand across the
southern region. The PC-maker shared an update on
the company’s performance while highlighting new
products launched under the eMachines brand.
The company announced two special schemes
during the campaign. Under the eMachines Feb
Frenzy scheme, resellers selling two notebooks
stand a chance to win Acer’s 320GB external HDD.
The eMachines Additional Warranty scheme
provides resellers the opportunity to sell a three
year onsite warranty on notebooks and netbooks. n

Rashi Peripherals recently concluded its first-ever
ATi-based HP workstation channel meet in seven
cities—Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune,
Ahmedabad and Delhi. Partners were updated on the
complete range of HP workstations along with the
target segments and the opportunities in the market
with the relevant information on the ISV-certified
SKUs and demand generation activities done by HP
and ISVs.
Said Vinay Awasthi, Director, PSG, HP India,
“With these initiatives we are aiming to equip them
better to cater to customer needs and add to their
business profitability. Similar training programs will
soon be rolled out for our partners in other tier 2
cities.” n

To feature your company’s events in CRN, send write-ups with photographs to editor@ubmindia.com

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011

www.crn.in

29

New Products
QNAP NAS servers for SMBs

Q

NAP has expanded its entry level Turbo NAS
lineup with the addition of the TS-412U rackmounted NAS server targeted at the fast-growing SMB
segment. The new 1U rack-mounted model features an
energy-efficient Marvell 1.2GHz CPU, 256MB of DDR2
memory, and 4 SATA hard drives with up to 12TB of
total capacity.

The TS-412U supports 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard
drives in hot-swappable drive carriers, iSCSI target
service with thin provisioning, and dual Gigabit LAN
ports with failover and load balancing.
The TS-412U also features 4 USB ports (1 front, 3
back panel) and 2 e-SATA ports for expanding the storage capacity or backing up the NAS data.
Available at a list price of `48,000, it is distributed
by Redington and comes with a one year limited India
warranty.

Fujitsu launches ScanSnap
N1800 scanner

F

ujitsu India has introduced ScanSnap N1800, which
is said to be the first network document scanner
to offer linking features to cloud services such as
Salesforce.com, Google Docs and Evernote.
The ScanSnap N1800, available in a small form
factor, delivers scanning speeds of up to 20ppm. It
comes with a management console to manage multiple
scanners, and provides users and workgroups specific
scanning rights.
Fujitsu is expected to announce the list price for
ScanSnap N1800 by next month. It comes with a oneyear warranty and is available from Fujitsu India.

Kobian launches PerfectView

K

obian has launched its Mercury
PerfectView LED monitor range
that boasts of a dynamic contrast ratio
of 1000000:1 and a response time
of 2 milliseconds. The monitors are
currently available in a piano-finish
body and 20- and 22-inch sizes. The
24-inch LED model will be launched
in May.
With a three year standard onsite
warranty, the 20-inch monitor is
available through Kobian distributors at an MRP of
`6,700 while the 22-inch LED is priced at `7,800.

Stellar launches Drive Clone

S

tellar Information Systems has
launched a Mac hard drive
clone utility called the Stellar
Drive Clone.
The software allows users to
clone Mac hard drives in realtime by creating mirror replicas of
their drives or volumes on a new
destination drive. The same could
be used to restore the data in situations like accidental formats or
drive crash.
Some of the important features
of this Drive Clone utility are cloning, imaging, restoration and creating a bootable DVD which can be used to
clone boot volume and is helpful in starting a nonbooting Mac system.
The product is available in a single home user
downloadable license for a price of `1,650 through the
companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Website, and comes with a lifetime warranty.

Zebronics launches premium
laptop cooling pad

T

op Notch Infotronix, under the brand Zebronics, has
launched the Zeb-NC3000 premium laptop cooling
pad. Sporting an 80mm fan that creates an airflow
volume of nearly 19 cubic ft
per minute, the cooling pad
comes in two colors, matt black
and electric red.
A retractable USB cord
enables the user to stow it
away. No other cables or power
adapters are required.
Distributed by Top Notch, the
cooling pad is available at a price
of `350 with a one year standard
warranty.

The products featured here have not undergone any benchmarking or testing. The trailers contain information provided by vendors and distributors.
To feature your companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s products in CRN, send write-ups with photos to editor@ubmindia.com

30

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

MarketPlace_Zyxel.qxp

3/29/2011

12:50 PM

Page 1

MarketPlace_Zyxel.qxp

3/29/2011

12:51 PM

Page 1

MarketPlace_Unistal_Biz_BSY.qxp

3/29/2011

2:56 PM

Page 1

shadow ram
GET

Digilink sold

Personal

T

he leading structured cabling brand, Digilink,
has been sold to Schneider Electric for `503
crore. Smartlink, the maker of Digilink products,
will however continue to sell its active networking
products under the Digisol brand.
While the rationale behind the acquisition still
remains unexplained, it truly is a windfall for
Smartlink and its promoter KR Naik who has earned
more than three times valuation for the structured
cabling business which garnered `155 crore in revenue
during the last fiscal.
Prima facie, there exists little connect between
Schneider, which is one of the world’s leading energy
and power solutions companies, and Digilink, which
is a pure-play structured cabling company with a local
India presence.
It is yet unknown how the Digilink business will
work under Schneider. Will the company continue
with the sales and distribution focus of Digilink? What
will eventually happen to the vast Digilink network of
channels? Digilink channels will surely be concerned
about the development.
Digilink’s archrival D-Link may be the most happy
about the development because it can now breathe
easy on the competition front, and with its structured
cabling foray expected anytime soon it will have more
leverage in the market compared to Digilink. n

Dutt goes

S

unil Dutt, VP, Personal Systems Group, HP India,
has quit after months of speculation. His last day at
HP will be May 30, 2011.
Rumors indicate that Dutt has been enrolled by
BlackBerry to head its India business, while other
industry sources suggest that he is launching his own
mobile handset business.
Dutt, who joined as
the head of HP PSG in
November 2009, replacing
Ravi Swaminathan, made
several changes to HP PSG’s
distribution. These included
the complete revamping of its
consumer PC distribution, and
segmenting the commercial
PC distribution. His strategy
to replace IT volume partners
with telecom players received
flak from the IT community.
Over a period of time however the model has been
praised by many in the channels as it has improved
the overall health and profitability of HP PSG
channels and helped the company to double its market
coverage, and win back market leadership. n

34

Computer Reseller News

01/04/2011 www.crn.in

“I’d like to end corruption”
Ankesh Kumar is Director of Channel
Products & Marketing at Emerson
Network Power. He is responsible for
the channel product line for Emerson
India. He also leads the marketing
communication team.
If not in the IT industry: I would
have been in a creative profession such
as film making.
Ankesh Kumar

Biggest passion: I’m addicted to
movies and gadgets.

Behind the wheels: I drive a Hyundai Getz. My dream vehicle is
the Mustang GT Sport.
Gadgets I can’t live without: My BlackBerry and my portable
HD media drive that houses 500 GB of movies.
Role model: JRD Tata for his integrity and ethical conduct.
Weekends are for: Exotic and adventurous outings, though
sometimes I like just lazing around.
Favorite holiday destination: Trinidad & Tobago. It offers a
true experience of the Caribbean and the locals have great taste for
music.
Hate the most: Lip service.
Ultimate ambition: Fame is what I crave for.
Wildest thing I’ve ever done: In heavy snowfall, I once rode
a bike without rear brakes 15,000 feet down the Bumla Pass to our
base at Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh.
Thing that I most want to do in life: To go on a cruise
around the world.
Favorite sport and sportsperson: Snooker. Among
sportspersons, I respect Sachin Tendulkar the most.
If I became the Prime Minister: I would try to eliminate
corruption from its core.
Celebrity I’d like to spend a day with: Amitabh Bachchan.
He has already ruled over the hearts of generations, and has still
not lost his charisma.
Deepest and darkest fear: Fear of losing my voice. n

— CRN Network

Fancy being one of the first to get your hands on an iPad 2 ?
Now is your chance to get one and
it’s just that simple !

Submit a Blue Coat order of
over US$100,000 by 30 April, 2011
and win an iPad 2

iPad 2

Terms and Conditions
This promotion is exclusive for Computerlinks and Blue Coat • Blue Coat order of over US$100,000 must be submitted by 30 April, 2011 •
The order must be processed through Computerlinks Singapore • Applicable to new business opportunity ONLY • The order with the largest
deal value will win the new Apple iPad 2 • This promotion is valid till 30 April, 2011 • Winner will be notified by COMPUTERLINKS SINGAPORE

WATCH FormulaOne!
Register your new business
opportunity onto blue source
stating COMPUTERLINKS as the
preferred distributor to enter the
weekly FormulaOne draw and
stand a chance to WIN

Terms and Conditions
Deals must be registered and forecasted to Blue Coat • Partners need to state COMPUTERLINKS as the distibutor choice and the Deal Registration
number/reference must be validated by COMPUTERLINKS • Applicable to new business opportunity ONLY • Open to all channel partners in
Asia, excluding channel partners in Pacific regions • Partners are entitled to choose F1 venue as their preferential choice • Partners are entitled
to enter a weekly draw • This promotion is only applicable to all channel partners in India, Singapore, Malaysia and ASEAN countries ONLY • This
promotion only covers the cost of tickets to FormulaOne in one of these 3 countries • Flights and accommodation will be at your own expense